Bloglines Work

Over the weekend, we pushed a couple of changes to the internal architecture of Bloglines. The changes were designed to off-load work from one of the databases (the Bloglines back-end consists of several different databases, spread over multiple machines). While the system was fairly responsive before the changes, these changes will help us continue to scale up. Last week was our best week so far, in terms of traffic and user growth. We have over 11 Million entries in the database. Alexa ranked us at 1,014 in terms of Internet traffic (our traffic drops on the weekends, so the number is higher right now). Traffic ranking systems are always inexact, but we are continuing to grow.
Scaling an Internet service is equal parts science and art. There is no one set blueprint that you can apply to every type of service. There are some basic concepts that you can adhere to, but everything else is application specific and varies over time. As long as you have growth, you are never done scaling an Internet service. It’s a fun but demanding challenge.